1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to document life cycle event notifications, and more specifically, to utilizing a document access control list to notify document stakeholders of document policy events.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Managing organizational information, such as documents or personnel records, as an organization grows becomes increasingly complex. To facilitate information management, many organizations employ an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. The ECM systems can provide techniques to manage a document over a document's life cycle. For example, a team of individuals starts the document's life cycle by initially creating a new document. At some point, the document is modified or updated as the document's requirements change (e.g., an engineering design change for an engineering document) and a new version of the document is released for use by the organization. Those individuals that have an interest in the document, such as document creators and users, are sometimes referred to as document stakeholders. Eventually, the document may become obsolete (e.g., a product based on the document is discontinued) and the document is marked for removal from the ECM system, thereby ending the life cycle of the document.
One function of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system may be to allow groups of users to collaborate on a document over the document's life cycle. During collaboration, the ECM systems may allow a document's stakeholders to be notified when changes are made to the document. Notifications may be triggered by various mechanisms such as events or workflow changes, and the notifications are sent to the users and user groups. Each event or workflow may specify one or more distribution lists that include users to be notified when a given condition is met (e.g., a document update or status change).
In a large ECM system with many documents, users, groups, events, retention periods, life cycle policies, and workflows, it becomes difficult to keep track of the intended users and groups mapped to any given distribution list. Further, distribution list mappings need to be updated or maintained as stakeholders change. One approach is to maintain the distribution list manually, where a document administrator or owner specifies a distribution list. In these large ECM systems, repository notification mechanisms become cumbersome to manage and are prone to errors. When the repository becomes large enough, it may not be feasible to map notification mechanisms to distribution lists manually (e.g., given the number of documents, users, and the resulting number of system notifications). Another approach may include a self-service model where users subscribe to notifications for various documents of interest. In a self-service scenario, each user maintains a list of those documents of interest. In either the manual model or the self-service model, users may have an interest in documents for Which they are unaware.